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Researchers Fish Yellowcake Uranium From the Sea With a Piece of Yarn (ieee.org)
Wave723 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at the U.S. Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and LCW Supercritical Technologies made use of readily available acrylic fibers to pull five grams of yellowcake -- a powdered form of uranium used to produce fuel for nuclear power reactors -- from seawater. The milestone, announced in mid-June, follows seven years of work and a roughly US $25 million investment by the federal energy agency. Another $1.15 million is being channeled to LCW as it attempts to scale up the technique for commercial use. The effort builds on work by Japanese researchers in the late 1990s and was prompted by interest in finding alternative sources of uranium for a future time when terrestrial sources are depleted. "[U]ranium in seawater shows up in concentrations of around 3.3 parts per billion," the report notes. "With a total volume estimated at more than 4 billion tons, there is around 500 times more uranium in seawater than in land-based sources."
See? Nuclear power is 100% safe! It is natural: it comes from the sea. Pumping the radioactive waste back into the sea will just return it to its natural state.
Extracting any metals from seawater requires straining through large volumes of H2O. Because desalination has the same requirement, the two technologies will naturally go together. The uranium alone could pay for the whole process, with many other extractable metals as a bonus. Instead of conflict minerals, the world will have thirst minerals.
"[U]ranium in seawater shows up in concentrations of around 3.3 parts per billion," the report notes. "With a total volume estimated at more than 4 billion tons, there is around 500 times more uranium in seawater than in land-based sources."
So if it's 3.3 parts per billion, that means there's 3.3 tons of uranium yellow uranium in a billion tons of water, and if there are 4 billion tons of seawater on planet, that means there are 13.2 tons of yellow cake uranium on the planet, give or take 1/500th (to account for the 1/500th of that amount in land-based sources).
Ken
...of yellowcake yarn.
Switch away from Uranium and start using extremely abundant thorium instead. LFTRs could be installed at every LWR on the planet to chew through their "waste" stockpiles prior to their decomissioning, then just use said thorium for fuel.
Why on Earth would this be made public?!
Because (a) it sounds consequential for non-proliferation but (b) it is not particularly so.
Triuranium octooxide is the major component of yellowcake; the current market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment was about $0.25, which was extracted at a cost of $25 million. Of course uranium prices are volatile, so the market value of the uranium extracted in the experiment has, in recent years, been as high as a dollar. And a scaled up production plant would be more efficient too. Still, there's a long way to go before it's competitive with mining.
Now granted use-value and market-value are two different things. If a country (a) had no uranium reserves and (b) had a coastline, it could, given a very, very long time gather enough yellowcake to, say, make a bomb, because you'd need thousands of tons of the stuff to feed into your enrichment process to obtain the required fissile isotopes. If you were a landlocked regime with nuclear ambitions and no uranium reserves, you'd have to compare the time and cost to this process to the effort of finding a dodgy merchant who will sell you yellowcake under the table.all arsenal. And most countries with no uranium can obtain it on the open market by starting a civilian nuclear power program.
Proliferation should scare you, but his particular development has almost zero marginal effect. Uranium is fairly common in the Earth's crust, which is why you find it in seawater, and even countries with zero commercially viable uranium deposits, like Pakistan, can scrape together enough domestically mined uranium to build a small arsenal.
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For some reasons U concentration is much higher in the ocean around Japan.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Yellowcake on it's own is not really restricted, I wouldn't be surprised if you found some on sale on ebay and you can certainly go and pick some uranium ore off the ground and extract yellowcake from it yourself. There are videos on youtube showing how it's done exactly, plus how to make yellowcake into actual uranium metal. But all that is worthless without an actual way to enrich it, all you'll get out of it is some raw uranium and probably some toxic and somewhat radioactive waste products, nothing useful for doing any harm to anyone but yourself.
How to put it plainly - NO. There is more radioactivity in a banana than seawater.
Research on extracting uranium from seawater using polymer matrix materials has been going for decades, with significant progress. The projected cost of extraction has fallen to as low as $350/kg, which is actually less than the peak spot market price of uranium hit in 2007, but higher than the 10 year average of about $100/kg.
This paper does a nice survey of this work up to about 2014, and does not include this most recent project. You can use SciHub to get the whole article but the abstract I link to provides a good summary of its key points which are:
The abstract gives a price range of $400-$1000/kg but if you read the paper the lower bound is really about $350, and obviously only the most cost-effective systems are going to be candidates for eventual commercial use. This latest work cited in TFA uses (potentially recycled) acrylic, and the focus seems to be on finding a better cost/performance ratio, whereas most of the research has focused primarily on performance. I would like to see this work put into context with all the other work that has been done, to see exactly what the advancements/benefits are.
But that won't be for a long time. We have proven uranium reserves on land good for over 100 years at current rates of use before the price will rise to $350/kg. The world produced $75 billion of electricity from nuclear power last years (at $30/MWh wholesale price) and the cost of the uranium to fuel it was $6.8 billion (using the ten year average price). At $350/kg the cost would be $24 billion, a significant increase in total electricity cost, but in the context of the trillions of dollars of economic output that runs on that electricity, one that could easily be absorbed. But the uranium in seawater is a 13,000 year supply, so it will not run out on any relevant timescale.
And if and when we need to use seawater uranium, one can expect that that $350/kg figure can be driven lower, with an additional century of research and a sustained focus on commercialization.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
First I couldn't get pudding if I didn't eat my meat. Now I need to get yarn to get cake? Where will this end?
No, they exist in seawater but just in really dilute concentrations.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Because it's essentially useless.
This may eventually count as an early result from which something useful can be developed, but the odds aren't really that good. (Also, it's not the first such result...though I found just using a piece of yarn as the lure to be interesting.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Potassium is more likely. It's often found in metabolism, and is actively concentrated by life. Then there's Carbon14, which is built right into the foundation, and when it decays to Nitrogen the configuration of the molecule is required to change.
Of all the CHON components, Carbon is the one most susceptible to radioactive decay. Deuterium is stable, and Tritium has too short a half-life to persist in the environment (and is also rare for other reasons). But Carbon14 is made all the time in the atmosphere at a rate which replenishes the supply as it decays.
N.B.: This kind of change is quite unlikely to have initiated life, but may have played a part in its evolution.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Just wondering if there is an expert here who can translate these levels.
It was recently reported that India's water supply in the Punjab region has concentrations of Uranium as high as 579 ug/l, well above permissible WHO limits of 30 ug/l. Measurements as high as 1440 ug/l have occurred elsewhere in India. As one point of reference, New York's water was reported to have a high of 0.1ug/l though the US as a whole was stated to have an average of 1.17 ug/l which means there are some places higher. Finland had the highest number with 6000 ug/l as their max.
But, given that a liter of seawater is about 1025 grams, seawater at 3.3 parts per billion uranium/seawater would seem to translate to 3.22 ug per liter of freshwater.
This would seem to indicate that many regions of the world have far higher concentrations of uranium in their groundwater than what is present in seawater.
The statement that their is 500 times more Uranium in seawater than on land could still be true because groundwater is a small portion of land and there is so much more seawater than groundwater. But it would seem that the best application of the technology due to higher concentrations available would be in cleaning the Uranium out of some of our groundwater supplies. That would help the people in those areas while providing a large portion of the Uranium to meet the world's needs. A region using a billion gallons of water a day (I don't think this is an unusual number for 10 million people or so,,, NYC is higher) is using over 8 billion pounds of water. If its uranium concentration is high enough that filters made of this material could extract a few hundred pounds per billion, you could reach tons per day.
Replacing the entire world demand of around 70,000 tons per year does not appear achievable without processing the much lower concentrations in seawater, but I guestimate by looking at tables of groundwater concentrations around the world that half of the world supply could be achievable and it could help pay for providing fresh water.
My question is whether I am translating ppm to ug/l correctly. If ppb is ppb of weight, I think it is correct. But if it is ppb of atoms, then it is way off because a Uranium atom weighs so much more than the average atom in seawater. Does anyone know?
Uranium is, if found in seawater in the open ocean, free-range and hormone-free. If extracted without the trolling nets they use for tuna, I think it is even able to be certified dolphin-safe.
Not really. There are some local variations in uranium concentrations in seawater, off the estuaries of major rivers fed from granitic mountains for example. Japan doesn't have much in the way of granite.
The Kuroshio ("Black Current") is a strong oceanic current that runs north-east along the southern shore of the Japanese Home Islands. The original Japanese uranium extraction experiments used this current to substitute for pumps and pipelines. They suspended the plastic fibre mats in static rafts and allowed the current to do the work for them.
Assuming oceanic extraction of uranium is implemented at a large scale and replenishment from rivers isn't up to replacing the extracted uranium then as time goes on the process would become less efficient and the price would rise. It would take some time though, centuries or even millenia.
One concentrated source of uranium in dissolved water is in the waste pits of coal-fired power stations. The Chinese have investigated the idea of processing this waste resource to extract uranium as they have few native sources of mineable uranium within their borders.
5 grams of yellowcake, 25 million in taxpayer funded money.
Why is the USA giving 20% of it's uranium to Russia?
If it takes 7 years to collect 5 grams, then the scale-up would be enormous.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.